Louisiana State University officials recently announced Alena Allen, the first Black dean of the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, would step down at the end of the academic year and return to the faculty full-time. However, Allen claims she was a victim of racial and gender discrimination and was forced to step down, according to an article from Black Enterprise.
After raising concerns regarding the law school’s finances, Allen says LSU administrators blamed her for the school’s fiscal challenges. But according to Allen, these budget gaps occurred before she was appointed to her deanship in 2023. When she requested an investigation into this alleged discrimination, LSU administrators told her the law school would go in a “different direction” without her leadership.
“I am the first woman and the first person of color to serve as the permanent dean of the Paul M. Hebert Law Center. That fact is not incidental — it is central to what follows,” Allen wrote in a response to auditors. “I find it deeply troubling, and frankly difficult to ignore, that I appear to be held to a standard far more exacting than that applied to my White, overwhelmingly male predecessors. It was they who oversaw and entrenched the very practices I have since questioned and begun to reform.”
A magna cum laude graduate of Loyola University of New Orleans, Allen earned her law degree from Yale Law School. She previously served as interim dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law and deputy director of the Association of American Law Schools.
Allen’s concerns follow several other recent resignations from Black administrators at LSU. In May, former president William Tate IV left the institution to assume the presidency of Rutgers University in New Jersey. Three months later, Dr. Tate hired two other former administrators from LSU to join his new executive leadership team: LSU’s chief administrative officer, Kimberly Lewis, will hold the same role at Rutgers, and LSU’s graduate school dean, Keena Arbuthnot, will serve as Rutgers’ chief academic officer.
Hey Alena Allen,
Since LSU is so damn racist, why don’t you just leave LSU completely. Why don’t you take your legal and administrative talents over to Southern University School of Law @SouthernULaw where it will be greatly appreciated.
Let me guess, you’re too comfortable living on in places such as the Garden District, Bocage, Central, Old South Baton Rouge, or the Highlands/Perkins to even think about leaving to the “other side of the railroad tracks”. The facts remain; it sounds like you got your wake-up call from your White colleagues who you probably thought were YOUR FRIENDS. Just think, you’re going to see these same White people every day from the hallways to staff meetings.
In close, I just bet you never taught any law courses at Southern University School of Law. Then, people like you wonder why things remain the same.
Keep on Keeping on!
Sincerely,
James A. Johnson
Hey James,
Your misguided comment is indicative of the problem with you rabid neoliberal establishment so-called Black academics nestled away at these HWCUs. YOU PEOPLE just don’t get it for some strange reason. When will so-called Black Americans cease with the pollyannish wishful thinking such as “Keep on Keeping on!” Until that mid 20th century mentality changes, the collective native born Black American community will continue to be nothing cannon fodder for White America.